O R A L H I S T O R Y
JUDY M. GROVER
U. S. FISH & WILDLIFE SERVICE
OFFICE OF THE DIRECTORATE
Interview
by
Dr. Mark Madison
April 21, 2001
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
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ORAL HISTORY
with
JUDY M. GROVER
by
Dr. Mark Madison
APRIL 21, 2001
ABSTRACT: From a ‘fish wife’ to the highest graded field position in her job series, Judy M. Grover
moved 14 times literally covering the four corners of the U.S. with her husband in pursuit of his
Fisheries career with the Fish & Wildlife Service. While raising a family of 3 boys, she still found
time to pick dead trout eggs from the hatching baskets and to fin clip salmon, permanently marking
them for later identification. Her Fish & Wildlife Service career began as a part-time clerk/typist at a
National Fish Hatchery and ended as the Pacific Region Regional Directors personal administrative
assistant upon retirement. In between, she had duty posts as the secretary to the Service’s Personnel
Officer in Washington, D.C., and as the personal assistant to the Department’s Regional Solicitor. Her
experiences brought her into direct contact with numerous people and some of the Service’s most
contentious and adversarial issues at the time – Endangered Species Act implementation, declining
Pacific salmon runs issues, litigating water issues and a fractured political climate.
National Conservation Training Center
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
April 21, 2001
Dr. MADISON: This is Mark Madison,
doing an oral history interview with Judy
Grover at the National Conservation Training
Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. It is
April 21, 2001. We usually start out Judy
asking where and when you were born?
MRS. GROVER: I was born in Upland,
California, July 16, 1940.
DR. MADISON What was your schooling?
MRS. GROVER: I went through grammar and
high school there in public schools, except for
first grade when I was sent to parochial school.
It was a boarding school because I was an only
child and my folks thought that I needed to be
around other children. I was so homesick that I
came home after 1 year. I skipped second grade
because I got too much of an education in first
grade. So when I graduated from high school at
sixteen, I was kind of ahead of myself. I did go to
junior college and I met Jerry. Then we went to
Utah State University, and he finished up. I never
did get my Bachelor’s degree, but I had enough
biology classes and secretarial classes that I was
able to do O.K.
DR. MADISON: What years were you at Utah
State?
MRS. GROVER: 1958-60. I graduated from High
School in 1957. Then I went to Chaffey Junior
College for 1 year and on to Utah State in 1958-9.
We were married in 1959 and then I went to work. I
got my “putting hubby through” degree at Utah
State. That’s my “PhT.”!
DR. MADISON: What type of work were you
doing?
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MRS. GROVER: I was a Secretary. I worked
for a defense plant, Thiokol. There was an
explosion of the Discovery [Space Shuttle] that
blew up a few years ago. That was the
Minuteman Missiles that we worked on in 1960
that blew up. It was the “O” rings that we had
worked on. I worked in the Instrumentation and
Testing section and they would literally blow
up these engines every night. I would get to
type up the lists that they would follow. There
were numbers, fifty digits long and one would
change. These were called Instrumentation and
Test Lists, so that’s what I typed for the
engineers.
DR. MADISON: That’s interesting work.
MRS. GROVER: It was interesting and then, to
see it evolve as time went on was nice.
DR. MADISON: Did Jerry [Grover, her
husband] take a job with FWS shortly
thereafter, or did you work for us first?
MRS. GROVER: No, he did. Basically, he was
working for the State of California, seasonally,
until he got his degree. Then he went back to
work for California and sent applications
everywhere, to every state. He finally got some
offers, I think the first one was Galveston,
Texas, and another one was Sandy Hook, New
Jersey. Finally, he got one from the Boston
office in Region 5. Then, he went to work. I
gave up my working for a while because when
he graduated and went back to work for the
State, I worked for Convair, Division of
General Dynamics, which was another big
defense plant. That
was basically secretarial work again.
DR. MADISON: So then, you guys moved to
Boston?
MRS. GROVER: Well, actually, we went to
White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia. We were
at National Fish Hatcheries within Region 5.
And there had been an old policy; they didn’t
have college graduates at fish hatcheries and
this is how they were going to get them. They
brought them back east, clear across the country.
We weren’t the only ones. They hired us, and we
came at our own expense, across country. All of a
sudden, “Well, you’ve got a job, but this is what it
is”?
DR. MADISON: Was it a culture shock moving to
West Virginia from California?
MRS. GROVER: It was. It was also a long ways
away from home. It was just Jerry and I, and we
didn’t have a whole lot of family back here, in fact,
there was none. We were young, and he had a job.
$4,040.00 a year was the salary. This was in 1961. I
stayed home, and got pregnant and started having
little boys. That’s what I did; I was a Fish and
Wildlife wife. We moved quite frequently in those
years.
DR. MADISON: How often did you move? That’s
changed a little bit recently. It would be interesting
to look at.
MRS. GROVER: Basically they said, “You’re a
GS-5, you started out and if you want a GS-7, you
have to move to another Hatchery.” And this is
what they did; they’d just pick everybody up and
just move you. And the moving was different then.
We didn’t have to buy and sell a house because we
were in a hatchery house. That was another
interesting thing; you just kind of drove into the
hatchery and, “O.K. where’s our house?” And it
was over there, and you were happy that you had a
roof over your head.
Our oldest, Jeff, was born in West Virginia. We
were there for about a year and a half, and they
moved us to Leetown, WV, just down the road from
here, and Jerry got his “7.” He was the Assistant
Manager, but they needed an Assistant Manager in
about 4 months, at Craig Brook NFH, East Orland,
Maine. So they picked us up, and moved us again.
That was a winter move. And it was a difficult one
because my father had just died. My mother was
living with us, and she was a basket case, and I was
a half of a basket case. Our little boy, Jeff, was a
year old. It was the first move, of any distance, with
a baby. It was the middle of winter.
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And we were going to Maine! I mean, it can
snow there too. It was kind of like this, the
moving van would say that they were going to
be there at 8 o’clock on Tuesday morning. So
you clean out the refrigerator, you eat all of the
food or throw it away. You pack all of the
bedding in the boxes and you sit, and wait for
the moving men to come. The van driver did
that to us for 3 days; saying that he was going
to be there the next morning, and it was
difficult. The third morning we didn’t totally
believe him, so we didn’t do anything. It was
snowing so hard that we couldn’t even see the
moving van in front of the house.
We took off for Maine, and it was snowing
hard all through Pennsylvania. We went up
through New York, and I remember it was
snowing hard in Massachusetts. When we got
to Maine, it was so cold. I mean it was like 25
degrees below zero. There was no furniture yet.
We had to stay in a hotel. In those years, when
you moved and you got to your duty station, all
of your per diem stopped. It didn’t matter if
you had furniture in your house or not. So we
had to put ourselves up in a hotel; which was
Jed Prouty’s Lodge. It was a lovely place to
stay, but too expensive for our blood.
Eventually the furniture got there, and we had
two nickels, maybe. I can remember spending
an old silver dollar that I had in my wallet to
buy groceries. I didn’t have enough
greenbacks, and so I spent my silver dollar.
DR. MADISON: Those times were rough.
MRS. GROVER: Yes they were!
DR. MADISON: What was it like living in the
hatchery houses? Were they usually nice
houses?
MRS. GROVER: Yes they were nice. They
were basic. You usually only had one
bathroom. The kids grew up, and all of a
sudden all five of you were using one bathroom
and it got a little crowded. Sometimes it was an
upstairs and downstairs bedroom situation and
when you had little kids, you didn’t want to
separate Mom and Dad from the kids, but we had to
do the best we could. They were basic housing.
There weren’t any dishwashers or microwaves in
those days. The houses would be clean and freshly
painted and you could count on a decent
refrigerator, range, and heating system.
DR. MADISON: Was it isolated living on the
Hatcheries?
MRS. GROVER: Yes, it was isolated. I chose not to
work when I had little children, and that was fine.
We didn’t have a whole lot of money, but then we
didn’t have a whole lot of wants either. It was just
usually that we’d get ready to move again. In
Maine, our second little boy was born. The year that
he was born was a pretty good weather year. We
didn’t have a blizzard on January 3rd, when he was
due. The year before, no one could get out of the
hatchery for 2 weeks. My Doctor said, “You will
come to
Bangor, and we will make an appointment to have
this baby. We are not going to wait”. There were no
complications or anything. But then, the next
summer, we moved again.
DR. MADISON: Where did you go after this?
MRS. GROVER: We went to the Cortland In-
Service Training School in New York. We opted to
move ourselves, because in those days, when you
went to the In-Service Training School, you just
basically were detailed. Sometimes for 6, 9 or 10
months and you didn’t really leave your permanent
duty station. At that point, we were trying to get
back west again. Grandmas and Grandpas were
back west. So we decided that we would move to
Cortland and we’ll hope that we can get out to
Region 1 after the course work.
DR. MADISON: With you guys in Maine, you
went away about as far as you could.
MRS. GROVER: Oh, I know. We couldn’t go any
further! I really wish I could have appreciated it
more. I wish that I had been older, and wiser, and
maybe that we hadn’t been quite so poor. But we
didn’t know any different. After that year in
Cortland, Jerry did get a job out in Region 1. We
5
went to Winthrop, Washington, which was
about as far north as you could get in
Washington State. It was just 30 miles from the
Canadian border.
DR. MADISON: Was Jerry a Hatchery
Manager at this point?
MRS. GROVER: No, he was still basically an
Assistant. He was still a GS-7 and he was a “7”
at three Hatcheries. Then Region 1 gave him
his “9” and the next spring we went on to
Ennis, Montana, again as the Assistant
Hatchery Manager. This was long before
Region 6 was developed, and Montana was part
of the Portland Region. So we went to
Montana. That was a nice cold place, too!
DR. MADISON: They never wanted to move
you south!
MRS. GROVER: Winthrop was a very snowy
place too. That was an interesting and very
pretty place. All along we were meeting nice
people. When we got to Montana, that was in
the Madison Valley and it’s beautiful place. We
had a third little boy there – born in a snow
storm on June 29th.
DR. MADISON: Was it hard on the kids, the
moving?
MRS. GROVER: No, our kids were real good
about it. Even when they got older, they just
threw their toys in the back of the car, and off
we’d go!
DR. MADISON: Where did you go from
Montana?
MRS. GROVER: We went back to California.
This was funny, because I cried when we left
California and went to While Sulfur Springs.
And Jerry said, “I can’t believe it, you are
crying and I am moving you back to
California!” But it was hard. Every time I
moved, I had kind of gotten my roots down
there. But we went to Coleman NFH, in
Anderson, California with a promotion to
GS-11. It was interesting. We were only a day’s
drive from where my mother lived. The kids got to
see a little more of Grandma. That was a neat
hatchery. Jerry ended up supervising that whole
complex from Portland many years later. When he
retired, he had a real soft spot in his heart for
Coleman. It was at Coleman NFH that I began fin
clipping salmon and steelhead. I job shared _ days
with another hatchery wife for a little extra pocket
money. They were marking 100’s of thousands of
fish in those days and a good fin clipper could mark
about 4,000 per day. Even with a crew, it provided
quite a bit of work
DR. MADISON: Did you go to the Regional Office
then?
MRS. GROVER: No. Then we went to Washington,
D.C. So we went back across the country again.
This was kind of interesting because we had
acquired a Siamese cat when we were in Cortland,
New York. So we moved him across country. We
moved him back across country to Washington,
D.C. That was the Departmental Management
Training Program, so we basically did like we did
with Cortland where we moved ourselves. But this
one we took just temporary stuff. You didn’t take
your furniture. You rented a house and furniture.
You had your dishes, your pots and pans, and your
clothes and that was about it. We moved to D.C.
and lived in Alexandria in a rented house. Jerry
worked and went to school there at Departmental
Training. Our kids had started school by then, so
that was interesting; being literally in the city,
where we had been out in the suburban woods,
basically.
The next year we moved back West, but not to
Coleman! We went to Carson National Fish
Hatchery on the Columbia River in Washington
State. There Jerry was the Hatchery Manager. He
had gotten his “11” when he went to Coleman, and
then he became an “11” Hatchery Manager at
Carson. Five years we were there, so that was a long
time for us!
DR. MADISON: You must have gotten somewhat
settled.
6
MRS. GROVER: Yes. Still we were in
hatchery housing though. People were
beginning to want to move off of hatcheries as
the rents kept increasing. But we really didn’t
have enough money to think about buying a
house. When the Hatchery was 14 miles from
town, down a very snowy road, it would be too
hard to commute back and forth. Our kids were
way into school by then. I went to work at
Carson. That was when the gasoline crisis
started.
DR. MADISON: So was this 1973 or 1972?
MRS. GROVER: Yes, from 1972 to 1977. All
of a sudden there wasn’t enough gasoline and
Jerry couldn’t get anybody to be the
Clerk/typist, at the hatchery. He had Forest
Service wives [as Clerks] because there were
Forest Service people living at the Hatchery. It
had far more housing than was needed. Now,
when you buy food for fish it comes all
prepared in a bag and you don’t need all of the
labor to work there preparing it. So we had
excess housing. But no Forest Service wives
were willing to work, so I went to work, 16
hours a week, 4 hours a day, 4 days a week. I
was his permanent Clerk, and it was funny. It
was kind of like he thought that I knew
everything that he did. I said, “No, I’m not
going to learn by osmosis.” But I learned, and it
was my first Government job. The Personnel
Officer in Portland literally had to get special
permission because of the laws; you don’t work
for your family, but I did. I worked for 1 year,
and then he found a Forest Service wife that
wanted to go to work. I had worked earlier as a
temporary again fin-clipping salmon. It was
before the wide use of coded wire tags (CWT)
and Jerry always complained at us for the
annual maiming program he had to go through.
By that time the Area Office concept was
beginning to come in. He wanted to go to the
Area Office as that was what the Washington,
D.C. training had prepared him for, and he
applied thinking that he could get Olympia or
Sacramento, or Boise. We got Jacksonville,
Florida.
So in 1977, that very same kitty cat that had already
been across the country three times went back. We
lived in Florida for 5 years, and bought our own
house. That was the first time that we were able to
do that. It was fun. We were able to live in a
neighborhood and could be a real family there. We
were there 5 years before they did away with Area
Offices. Our two older children were out of high
school by then and Jeff was in junior college. He
was a musician and his music teacher suggested that
he apply for the Military Band. He was going to
stay on the east coast. The second boy had
graduated from high school, and he was going to
stay on the east coast attending college in North
Carolina.
So we were thinking, “They’re closing our office,
we want a job on the east coast”. We thought,
“Good, Washington, D.C., get it out of the way”.
There were no jobs in Washington, D.C. mainly
because they were closing all of those offices and
there was an excess of managers. But salmon
hatcheries called so back to Portland we went. We
left the two older kids on the east coast. That was
hard. It was hard on our youngest son and on me
because all of a sudden our family went from five to
three. The younger one was coming into high
school.
I realized that I needed to go to work. There wasn’t
enough money. We couldn’t sell our house in
Florida. That was in the days when there were “due
on sale” clauses on regular commercial mortgages,
and it was a military town with all the much cheaper
V.A. loans available. So we had a house in Florida
and a job in Oregon, and a kid in College in North
Carolina.
DR. MADISON: Geez! So you went back to work?
MRS. GROVER: I went back to work. I went to
work in Personnel in the Portland Regional Office.
The same Personnel Officer that got me permission
to go to work at the Carson Hatchery; I went to
work for him. I started out as a GS-4 or 5. Then, the
next year wouldn’t you know, a good job in
Washington, D.C., opened up. Actually, it was just
a little less than 2 years. Because we finally sold the
house in Florida; it was kind of like we put the
7
middle son on the plane to go back to college in
North Carolina on January 3rd. We gave him
the last dollar that we had because we were
paying for a house in Florida and renting a
house in Oregon. Jerry got a call that afternoon
that the house sold. Everything fell into place.
We sold a house, built a house, and lived in it a
year before we went to Washington, D.C. That
was in 1984. Jerry went back as the Chief of
Fish Hatcheries and I got a job as the
secretary/admin assistant to the Service’s
Personnel Officer back in Washington, D.C. I
also worked for Joe Piehuta. That’s why Joe is
such a good friend of mine.
Then there began all kinds of reorganization in
the Service, and Jerry didn’t have a job he
wanted in Washington, D.C. They were down-sizing
staffing, shifting people, and reducing
grades and putting the positions into the
Regions. I found a job with the Department’s
Regional Solicitor in Portland, Oregon, which I
thought was very interesting. You work for all
of the Department of the Interior -- the Park
Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the
Bureaus of Land Management, Mines as well
as the Fish & Wildlife Service. I worked for the
Regional Solicitor in Portland, Oregon for 3
years. Meanwhile, Jerry got a job after about 4
months, and back to Portland he went. Then we
were able to stay. We got into our house again.
DR. MADISON: So you hadn’t sold the house
there?
MRS. GROVER: No, we rented it. It wasn’t
even a year old. And it was just like the way we
wanted it. I think that Jerry got a three to five-year
assignment, so it looked like it wasn’t
going to be forever. They were having trouble
getting people into Washington. People did not
want to get in there, and feel like they couldn’t
get out again. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to
go, but we had moved so much that it was hard.
We still didn’t have any money. We were still
poor!
DR. MADISON: All of your money must have
gone to moving expenses!
MRS. GROVER: Yes, because basically, the
moving allowances weren’t as good as they are
now. Somehow it just never covered everything. It
was hard, not selling the house in Florida. You kept
it for months after you weren’t living in it anymore.
But by that time, I had worked my way up to a GS-
7. At least I was making a few more nickels. The
kids were getting older and going to college, and
having to pay those expenses, but I worked for the
Regional Solicitor. Then, after 3 years the Regional
Director’s
Secretary out in Region 1 retired. Jerry said that he
didn’t want me working in that job. He thought that
I was too close. Marv Plenert was the Regional
Director and he interviewed me, and I really wanted
that job, so I went for it. It was fun, I enjoyed that
job, I really did. I could see how everything worked.
I had lived it. I had worked at the field office, and I
had working at the Washington office and then I
worked at the Regional office too. I am still married
to the Service after all of these years, but then I got
to work, and this is an odd word that they use, but
they call the Regional Director’s Secretary the
“head bitch of the Region.” I’m not kidding, every
piece of mail that came to the Region came to my
desk. I had to decide which program would handle
all of these requests that came in and as the ‘gate
keeper,’ I had to decide whom could just walk into
the Regional Directors office. There were an awful
lot of decisions made by my desk. Of course by that
time, they had controlled correspondence in
Washington, D. C. That was the red folders. So I
started the red folders out there.
DR. MADISON: So you’re the one to blame.
MRS. GROVER: I am! They still have them out
there. If somebody was going to put a due date on it
in Washington, I was going to put a due date on it
out there. I started that out there, and made people
toe the mark! But that was fun.
DR. MADISON: And that’s where you spent the
rest of your time in the Service?
MRS. GROVER: Yes, that’s where I spent the rest
of my career.
8
DR. MADISON: Is there anything interesting
that happened when you were there, that you
care to share?
MRS. GROVER: I was working for Marv
Plenert, he was a very good Regional Director.
This man made decisions. All of the people
who worked for him were happy to have him
there, because if you went up to him with a
problem and he made a decision, it was either,
“Hell yes, or hell no.” And he was fun to work
for. He lost his daughter, she got cancer and
died, and it was really hard to try and help him
to do his job of running the Region during this
time. We went through the Spotted Owls. That
was such a controversy out there, and I had
been in the middle of it in the Solicitor’s office.
The attorney that handled the Bureau of Land
Management was on one side of my desk. And
even though I worked for the Regional
Solicitor, I worked for all twenty-five
attorneys. And the attorney that represented the
Fish and Wildlife Service who was trying to
stop the BLM from cutting down the forest and
killing all of the Spotted Owls was on the other
side of my desk. So the Spotted Owl dilemma
ran our lives as did Klamath Basin and
California water issues, California’s Bay/Delta
controversy, the southern California gnat
catcher. The Pacific Region had the largest
funding, the most staff and was the busiest and
most involved Region of the Service on major
issues.
DR. MADISON: I can imagine. [Dave]
Klinger still talks about it.
MRS. GROVER: It was difficult. I worked
with David Klinger in Washington, D. C.
because Public Affairs and Personnel shared a
corridor. I knew David, and when we all
worked together out in Portland, telephone calls
would come in; people were asking what was
going to happen. I had to give a lot of these
calls to David. We would be put on the hot seat
a lot. There were Judges telling us what to do,
by what day and of course all of the loggers
were starving to death because we wouldn’t let
them cut the trees down.
One of the most interesting things that happened,
and in this of course, politics got involved;
President Clinton said that if he was elected, he
would go out and mediate this situation. We had a
Forest Conference in April of 1993 when he was
first elected, and I got to sit in on that. That was
very interesting. Basically, I was a doorkeeper. I got
to stand inside the door and make sure that nobody
came in. We had the Secretaries of Labor and
Interior and Commerce who were all there trying to
represent, as well as the President and the Vice
President. People came from all over the northwest
appealing their cases. The loggers and the forest
products people were saying, “We’ve got to have
this, and we’ve got to keep these people working.”
We in the Fish and Wildlife Service realized that if
they kept cutting, in 10 years there would be no
more forest. We wondered how they couldn’t see
this. I remember President Clinton standing up and
saying that no one was going to be happy with him.
The environmentalists weren’t going to be happy
because they were going to let them cut a little bit.
The loggers weren’t going to be happy because they
couldn’t cut all they wanted. It was quite a day. It
was literally all day long. We, who were working in
there had to go and be cleared by Secret Service.
We arrived by bus at like 6:00 A.M., and the
meeting convened at maybe nine or ten. We had
Secret Service all over the place. It was very
interesting.
While I was working in the RD’s office something
that became apparent was the secretarial skills
needed to be upgraded if the secretary’s were
expected to be promoted. We started a Certified
Professional Secretary course for the secretaries in
the Regional office. The Deputy Regional
Director’s Secretary and I who had worked together
for many years were told that we would take it, and
we would pass. We had been taking this economics
course, which was hard. It was not an easy course.
We were taking accounting and more, and doing all
of this after hours. When we had the Forest
Conference out here and President Clinton started
talking about world economics I realized the reason
I was taking this course. It all kind of fell into place,
and he made it all very understandable. That was a
really exciting time, I thought, to be working for the
Service. And I felt very privileged to be in on that
9
Conference. I thought that we were making a
difference in the world out there. It was fun.
DR. MADISON: It was an exciting time, and
you were.
MRS. GROVER: It really was. Of course, I can
remember Marv Plenert, the Regional Director
saying, “Now just wait until the salmon are
listed” (as an Endangered Species). Of course,
it happened. It wasn’t so much the Service,
because it is the National Marine Fisheries
Service that did the listing, but it does affect
everything of the Fish and Wildlife Service and
its National Fish Hatchery System so important
on the Columbia River and in the Northwest,
and of all the people that live there too. Those
were very interesting times. This training also
had the side benefit of qualifying me for
promotion. I was promoted to a GS-10, the
highest grade in the Service for my position
outside the Washington Office.
DR. MADISON: Judy, I have to break this off.
I have got to go and do the workshop. But this
was great! It was just fascinating!
MRS. GROVER: It’s an interesting life, Mark!
DR. MADISON: It is an interesting life. It must
have been a culture shock going from the
Hatcheries to the Regional Office to a certain
extent, wasn’t it?
MRS. GROVER: Yes, but I think we were
ready for it. We had grown. I thought that the 5
years that we spent in Florida were a growing
experience. All of us did. The kids did, too. We
were part of a neighborhood, after having only
been in this little government complex. You
really have kind of a narrow life out there, and
maybe that’s why people object to being
isolated now. We didn’t know any better when
we started out. The world has grown much in
those years, from the late 1950s and early
1960s to the new century.
DR. MADISON: I have to say that off the
record…
[tape ends]
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O R A L H I S T O R Y
JUDY M. GROVER
U. S. FISH & WILDLIFE SERVICE
OFFICE OF THE DIRECTORATE
Interview
by
Dr. Mark Madison
April 21, 2001
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
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ORAL HISTORY
with
JUDY M. GROVER
by
Dr. Mark Madison
APRIL 21, 2001
ABSTRACT: From a ‘fish wife’ to the highest graded field position in her job series, Judy M. Grover
moved 14 times literally covering the four corners of the U.S. with her husband in pursuit of his
Fisheries career with the Fish & Wildlife Service. While raising a family of 3 boys, she still found
time to pick dead trout eggs from the hatching baskets and to fin clip salmon, permanently marking
them for later identification. Her Fish & Wildlife Service career began as a part-time clerk/typist at a
National Fish Hatchery and ended as the Pacific Region Regional Directors personal administrative
assistant upon retirement. In between, she had duty posts as the secretary to the Service’s Personnel
Officer in Washington, D.C., and as the personal assistant to the Department’s Regional Solicitor. Her
experiences brought her into direct contact with numerous people and some of the Service’s most
contentious and adversarial issues at the time – Endangered Species Act implementation, declining
Pacific salmon runs issues, litigating water issues and a fractured political climate.
National Conservation Training Center
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
April 21, 2001
Dr. MADISON: This is Mark Madison,
doing an oral history interview with Judy
Grover at the National Conservation Training
Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. It is
April 21, 2001. We usually start out Judy
asking where and when you were born?
MRS. GROVER: I was born in Upland,
California, July 16, 1940.
DR. MADISON What was your schooling?
MRS. GROVER: I went through grammar and
high school there in public schools, except for
first grade when I was sent to parochial school.
It was a boarding school because I was an only
child and my folks thought that I needed to be
around other children. I was so homesick that I
came home after 1 year. I skipped second grade
because I got too much of an education in first
grade. So when I graduated from high school at
sixteen, I was kind of ahead of myself. I did go to
junior college and I met Jerry. Then we went to
Utah State University, and he finished up. I never
did get my Bachelor’s degree, but I had enough
biology classes and secretarial classes that I was
able to do O.K.
DR. MADISON: What years were you at Utah
State?
MRS. GROVER: 1958-60. I graduated from High
School in 1957. Then I went to Chaffey Junior
College for 1 year and on to Utah State in 1958-9.
We were married in 1959 and then I went to work. I
got my “putting hubby through” degree at Utah
State. That’s my “PhT.”!
DR. MADISON: What type of work were you
doing?
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MRS. GROVER: I was a Secretary. I worked
for a defense plant, Thiokol. There was an
explosion of the Discovery [Space Shuttle] that
blew up a few years ago. That was the
Minuteman Missiles that we worked on in 1960
that blew up. It was the “O” rings that we had
worked on. I worked in the Instrumentation and
Testing section and they would literally blow
up these engines every night. I would get to
type up the lists that they would follow. There
were numbers, fifty digits long and one would
change. These were called Instrumentation and
Test Lists, so that’s what I typed for the
engineers.
DR. MADISON: That’s interesting work.
MRS. GROVER: It was interesting and then, to
see it evolve as time went on was nice.
DR. MADISON: Did Jerry [Grover, her
husband] take a job with FWS shortly
thereafter, or did you work for us first?
MRS. GROVER: No, he did. Basically, he was
working for the State of California, seasonally,
until he got his degree. Then he went back to
work for California and sent applications
everywhere, to every state. He finally got some
offers, I think the first one was Galveston,
Texas, and another one was Sandy Hook, New
Jersey. Finally, he got one from the Boston
office in Region 5. Then, he went to work. I
gave up my working for a while because when
he graduated and went back to work for the
State, I worked for Convair, Division of
General Dynamics, which was another big
defense plant. That
was basically secretarial work again.
DR. MADISON: So then, you guys moved to
Boston?
MRS. GROVER: Well, actually, we went to
White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia. We were
at National Fish Hatcheries within Region 5.
And there had been an old policy; they didn’t
have college graduates at fish hatcheries and
this is how they were going to get them. They
brought them back east, clear across the country.
We weren’t the only ones. They hired us, and we
came at our own expense, across country. All of a
sudden, “Well, you’ve got a job, but this is what it
is”?
DR. MADISON: Was it a culture shock moving to
West Virginia from California?
MRS. GROVER: It was. It was also a long ways
away from home. It was just Jerry and I, and we
didn’t have a whole lot of family back here, in fact,
there was none. We were young, and he had a job.
$4,040.00 a year was the salary. This was in 1961. I
stayed home, and got pregnant and started having
little boys. That’s what I did; I was a Fish and
Wildlife wife. We moved quite frequently in those
years.
DR. MADISON: How often did you move? That’s
changed a little bit recently. It would be interesting
to look at.
MRS. GROVER: Basically they said, “You’re a
GS-5, you started out and if you want a GS-7, you
have to move to another Hatchery.” And this is
what they did; they’d just pick everybody up and
just move you. And the moving was different then.
We didn’t have to buy and sell a house because we
were in a hatchery house. That was another
interesting thing; you just kind of drove into the
hatchery and, “O.K. where’s our house?” And it
was over there, and you were happy that you had a
roof over your head.
Our oldest, Jeff, was born in West Virginia. We
were there for about a year and a half, and they
moved us to Leetown, WV, just down the road from
here, and Jerry got his “7.” He was the Assistant
Manager, but they needed an Assistant Manager in
about 4 months, at Craig Brook NFH, East Orland,
Maine. So they picked us up, and moved us again.
That was a winter move. And it was a difficult one
because my father had just died. My mother was
living with us, and she was a basket case, and I was
a half of a basket case. Our little boy, Jeff, was a
year old. It was the first move, of any distance, with
a baby. It was the middle of winter.
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And we were going to Maine! I mean, it can
snow there too. It was kind of like this, the
moving van would say that they were going to
be there at 8 o’clock on Tuesday morning. So
you clean out the refrigerator, you eat all of the
food or throw it away. You pack all of the
bedding in the boxes and you sit, and wait for
the moving men to come. The van driver did
that to us for 3 days; saying that he was going
to be there the next morning, and it was
difficult. The third morning we didn’t totally
believe him, so we didn’t do anything. It was
snowing so hard that we couldn’t even see the
moving van in front of the house.
We took off for Maine, and it was snowing
hard all through Pennsylvania. We went up
through New York, and I remember it was
snowing hard in Massachusetts. When we got
to Maine, it was so cold. I mean it was like 25
degrees below zero. There was no furniture yet.
We had to stay in a hotel. In those years, when
you moved and you got to your duty station, all
of your per diem stopped. It didn’t matter if
you had furniture in your house or not. So we
had to put ourselves up in a hotel; which was
Jed Prouty’s Lodge. It was a lovely place to
stay, but too expensive for our blood.
Eventually the furniture got there, and we had
two nickels, maybe. I can remember spending
an old silver dollar that I had in my wallet to
buy groceries. I didn’t have enough
greenbacks, and so I spent my silver dollar.
DR. MADISON: Those times were rough.
MRS. GROVER: Yes they were!
DR. MADISON: What was it like living in the
hatchery houses? Were they usually nice
houses?
MRS. GROVER: Yes they were nice. They
were basic. You usually only had one
bathroom. The kids grew up, and all of a
sudden all five of you were using one bathroom
and it got a little crowded. Sometimes it was an
upstairs and downstairs bedroom situation and
when you had little kids, you didn’t want to
separate Mom and Dad from the kids, but we had to
do the best we could. They were basic housing.
There weren’t any dishwashers or microwaves in
those days. The houses would be clean and freshly
painted and you could count on a decent
refrigerator, range, and heating system.
DR. MADISON: Was it isolated living on the
Hatcheries?
MRS. GROVER: Yes, it was isolated. I chose not to
work when I had little children, and that was fine.
We didn’t have a whole lot of money, but then we
didn’t have a whole lot of wants either. It was just
usually that we’d get ready to move again. In
Maine, our second little boy was born. The year that
he was born was a pretty good weather year. We
didn’t have a blizzard on January 3rd, when he was
due. The year before, no one could get out of the
hatchery for 2 weeks. My Doctor said, “You will
come to
Bangor, and we will make an appointment to have
this baby. We are not going to wait”. There were no
complications or anything. But then, the next
summer, we moved again.
DR. MADISON: Where did you go after this?
MRS. GROVER: We went to the Cortland In-
Service Training School in New York. We opted to
move ourselves, because in those days, when you
went to the In-Service Training School, you just
basically were detailed. Sometimes for 6, 9 or 10
months and you didn’t really leave your permanent
duty station. At that point, we were trying to get
back west again. Grandmas and Grandpas were
back west. So we decided that we would move to
Cortland and we’ll hope that we can get out to
Region 1 after the course work.
DR. MADISON: With you guys in Maine, you
went away about as far as you could.
MRS. GROVER: Oh, I know. We couldn’t go any
further! I really wish I could have appreciated it
more. I wish that I had been older, and wiser, and
maybe that we hadn’t been quite so poor. But we
didn’t know any different. After that year in
Cortland, Jerry did get a job out in Region 1. We
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went to Winthrop, Washington, which was
about as far north as you could get in
Washington State. It was just 30 miles from the
Canadian border.
DR. MADISON: Was Jerry a Hatchery
Manager at this point?
MRS. GROVER: No, he was still basically an
Assistant. He was still a GS-7 and he was a “7”
at three Hatcheries. Then Region 1 gave him
his “9” and the next spring we went on to
Ennis, Montana, again as the Assistant
Hatchery Manager. This was long before
Region 6 was developed, and Montana was part
of the Portland Region. So we went to
Montana. That was a nice cold place, too!
DR. MADISON: They never wanted to move
you south!
MRS. GROVER: Winthrop was a very snowy
place too. That was an interesting and very
pretty place. All along we were meeting nice
people. When we got to Montana, that was in
the Madison Valley and it’s beautiful place. We
had a third little boy there – born in a snow
storm on June 29th.
DR. MADISON: Was it hard on the kids, the
moving?
MRS. GROVER: No, our kids were real good
about it. Even when they got older, they just
threw their toys in the back of the car, and off
we’d go!
DR. MADISON: Where did you go from
Montana?
MRS. GROVER: We went back to California.
This was funny, because I cried when we left
California and went to While Sulfur Springs.
And Jerry said, “I can’t believe it, you are
crying and I am moving you back to
California!” But it was hard. Every time I
moved, I had kind of gotten my roots down
there. But we went to Coleman NFH, in
Anderson, California with a promotion to
GS-11. It was interesting. We were only a day’s
drive from where my mother lived. The kids got to
see a little more of Grandma. That was a neat
hatchery. Jerry ended up supervising that whole
complex from Portland many years later. When he
retired, he had a real soft spot in his heart for
Coleman. It was at Coleman NFH that I began fin
clipping salmon and steelhead. I job shared _ days
with another hatchery wife for a little extra pocket
money. They were marking 100’s of thousands of
fish in those days and a good fin clipper could mark
about 4,000 per day. Even with a crew, it provided
quite a bit of work
DR. MADISON: Did you go to the Regional Office
then?
MRS. GROVER: No. Then we went to Washington,
D.C. So we went back across the country again.
This was kind of interesting because we had
acquired a Siamese cat when we were in Cortland,
New York. So we moved him across country. We
moved him back across country to Washington,
D.C. That was the Departmental Management
Training Program, so we basically did like we did
with Cortland where we moved ourselves. But this
one we took just temporary stuff. You didn’t take
your furniture. You rented a house and furniture.
You had your dishes, your pots and pans, and your
clothes and that was about it. We moved to D.C.
and lived in Alexandria in a rented house. Jerry
worked and went to school there at Departmental
Training. Our kids had started school by then, so
that was interesting; being literally in the city,
where we had been out in the suburban woods,
basically.
The next year we moved back West, but not to
Coleman! We went to Carson National Fish
Hatchery on the Columbia River in Washington
State. There Jerry was the Hatchery Manager. He
had gotten his “11” when he went to Coleman, and
then he became an “11” Hatchery Manager at
Carson. Five years we were there, so that was a long
time for us!
DR. MADISON: You must have gotten somewhat
settled.
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MRS. GROVER: Yes. Still we were in
hatchery housing though. People were
beginning to want to move off of hatcheries as
the rents kept increasing. But we really didn’t
have enough money to think about buying a
house. When the Hatchery was 14 miles from
town, down a very snowy road, it would be too
hard to commute back and forth. Our kids were
way into school by then. I went to work at
Carson. That was when the gasoline crisis
started.
DR. MADISON: So was this 1973 or 1972?
MRS. GROVER: Yes, from 1972 to 1977. All
of a sudden there wasn’t enough gasoline and
Jerry couldn’t get anybody to be the
Clerk/typist, at the hatchery. He had Forest
Service wives [as Clerks] because there were
Forest Service people living at the Hatchery. It
had far more housing than was needed. Now,
when you buy food for fish it comes all
prepared in a bag and you don’t need all of the
labor to work there preparing it. So we had
excess housing. But no Forest Service wives
were willing to work, so I went to work, 16
hours a week, 4 hours a day, 4 days a week. I
was his permanent Clerk, and it was funny. It
was kind of like he thought that I knew
everything that he did. I said, “No, I’m not
going to learn by osmosis.” But I learned, and it
was my first Government job. The Personnel
Officer in Portland literally had to get special
permission because of the laws; you don’t work
for your family, but I did. I worked for 1 year,
and then he found a Forest Service wife that
wanted to go to work. I had worked earlier as a
temporary again fin-clipping salmon. It was
before the wide use of coded wire tags (CWT)
and Jerry always complained at us for the
annual maiming program he had to go through.
By that time the Area Office concept was
beginning to come in. He wanted to go to the
Area Office as that was what the Washington,
D.C. training had prepared him for, and he
applied thinking that he could get Olympia or
Sacramento, or Boise. We got Jacksonville,
Florida.
So in 1977, that very same kitty cat that had already
been across the country three times went back. We
lived in Florida for 5 years, and bought our own
house. That was the first time that we were able to
do that. It was fun. We were able to live in a
neighborhood and could be a real family there. We
were there 5 years before they did away with Area
Offices. Our two older children were out of high
school by then and Jeff was in junior college. He
was a musician and his music teacher suggested that
he apply for the Military Band. He was going to
stay on the east coast. The second boy had
graduated from high school, and he was going to
stay on the east coast attending college in North
Carolina.
So we were thinking, “They’re closing our office,
we want a job on the east coast”. We thought,
“Good, Washington, D.C., get it out of the way”.
There were no jobs in Washington, D.C. mainly
because they were closing all of those offices and
there was an excess of managers. But salmon
hatcheries called so back to Portland we went. We
left the two older kids on the east coast. That was
hard. It was hard on our youngest son and on me
because all of a sudden our family went from five to
three. The younger one was coming into high
school.
I realized that I needed to go to work. There wasn’t
enough money. We couldn’t sell our house in
Florida. That was in the days when there were “due
on sale” clauses on regular commercial mortgages,
and it was a military town with all the much cheaper
V.A. loans available. So we had a house in Florida
and a job in Oregon, and a kid in College in North
Carolina.
DR. MADISON: Geez! So you went back to work?
MRS. GROVER: I went back to work. I went to
work in Personnel in the Portland Regional Office.
The same Personnel Officer that got me permission
to go to work at the Carson Hatchery; I went to
work for him. I started out as a GS-4 or 5. Then, the
next year wouldn’t you know, a good job in
Washington, D.C., opened up. Actually, it was just
a little less than 2 years. Because we finally sold the
house in Florida; it was kind of like we put the
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middle son on the plane to go back to college in
North Carolina on January 3rd. We gave him
the last dollar that we had because we were
paying for a house in Florida and renting a
house in Oregon. Jerry got a call that afternoon
that the house sold. Everything fell into place.
We sold a house, built a house, and lived in it a
year before we went to Washington, D.C. That
was in 1984. Jerry went back as the Chief of
Fish Hatcheries and I got a job as the
secretary/admin assistant to the Service’s
Personnel Officer back in Washington, D.C. I
also worked for Joe Piehuta. That’s why Joe is
such a good friend of mine.
Then there began all kinds of reorganization in
the Service, and Jerry didn’t have a job he
wanted in Washington, D.C. They were down-sizing
staffing, shifting people, and reducing
grades and putting the positions into the
Regions. I found a job with the Department’s
Regional Solicitor in Portland, Oregon, which I
thought was very interesting. You work for all
of the Department of the Interior -- the Park
Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the
Bureaus of Land Management, Mines as well
as the Fish & Wildlife Service. I worked for the
Regional Solicitor in Portland, Oregon for 3
years. Meanwhile, Jerry got a job after about 4
months, and back to Portland he went. Then we
were able to stay. We got into our house again.
DR. MADISON: So you hadn’t sold the house
there?
MRS. GROVER: No, we rented it. It wasn’t
even a year old. And it was just like the way we
wanted it. I think that Jerry got a three to five-year
assignment, so it looked like it wasn’t
going to be forever. They were having trouble
getting people into Washington. People did not
want to get in there, and feel like they couldn’t
get out again. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to
go, but we had moved so much that it was hard.
We still didn’t have any money. We were still
poor!
DR. MADISON: All of your money must have
gone to moving expenses!
MRS. GROVER: Yes, because basically, the
moving allowances weren’t as good as they are
now. Somehow it just never covered everything. It
was hard, not selling the house in Florida. You kept
it for months after you weren’t living in it anymore.
But by that time, I had worked my way up to a GS-
7. At least I was making a few more nickels. The
kids were getting older and going to college, and
having to pay those expenses, but I worked for the
Regional Solicitor. Then, after 3 years the Regional
Director’s
Secretary out in Region 1 retired. Jerry said that he
didn’t want me working in that job. He thought that
I was too close. Marv Plenert was the Regional
Director and he interviewed me, and I really wanted
that job, so I went for it. It was fun, I enjoyed that
job, I really did. I could see how everything worked.
I had lived it. I had worked at the field office, and I
had working at the Washington office and then I
worked at the Regional office too. I am still married
to the Service after all of these years, but then I got
to work, and this is an odd word that they use, but
they call the Regional Director’s Secretary the
“head bitch of the Region.” I’m not kidding, every
piece of mail that came to the Region came to my
desk. I had to decide which program would handle
all of these requests that came in and as the ‘gate
keeper,’ I had to decide whom could just walk into
the Regional Directors office. There were an awful
lot of decisions made by my desk. Of course by that
time, they had controlled correspondence in
Washington, D. C. That was the red folders. So I
started the red folders out there.
DR. MADISON: So you’re the one to blame.
MRS. GROVER: I am! They still have them out
there. If somebody was going to put a due date on it
in Washington, I was going to put a due date on it
out there. I started that out there, and made people
toe the mark! But that was fun.
DR. MADISON: And that’s where you spent the
rest of your time in the Service?
MRS. GROVER: Yes, that’s where I spent the rest
of my career.
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DR. MADISON: Is there anything interesting
that happened when you were there, that you
care to share?
MRS. GROVER: I was working for Marv
Plenert, he was a very good Regional Director.
This man made decisions. All of the people
who worked for him were happy to have him
there, because if you went up to him with a
problem and he made a decision, it was either,
“Hell yes, or hell no.” And he was fun to work
for. He lost his daughter, she got cancer and
died, and it was really hard to try and help him
to do his job of running the Region during this
time. We went through the Spotted Owls. That
was such a controversy out there, and I had
been in the middle of it in the Solicitor’s office.
The attorney that handled the Bureau of Land
Management was on one side of my desk. And
even though I worked for the Regional
Solicitor, I worked for all twenty-five
attorneys. And the attorney that represented the
Fish and Wildlife Service who was trying to
stop the BLM from cutting down the forest and
killing all of the Spotted Owls was on the other
side of my desk. So the Spotted Owl dilemma
ran our lives as did Klamath Basin and
California water issues, California’s Bay/Delta
controversy, the southern California gnat
catcher. The Pacific Region had the largest
funding, the most staff and was the busiest and
most involved Region of the Service on major
issues.
DR. MADISON: I can imagine. [Dave]
Klinger still talks about it.
MRS. GROVER: It was difficult. I worked
with David Klinger in Washington, D. C.
because Public Affairs and Personnel shared a
corridor. I knew David, and when we all
worked together out in Portland, telephone calls
would come in; people were asking what was
going to happen. I had to give a lot of these
calls to David. We would be put on the hot seat
a lot. There were Judges telling us what to do,
by what day and of course all of the loggers
were starving to death because we wouldn’t let
them cut the trees down.
One of the most interesting things that happened,
and in this of course, politics got involved;
President Clinton said that if he was elected, he
would go out and mediate this situation. We had a
Forest Conference in April of 1993 when he was
first elected, and I got to sit in on that. That was
very interesting. Basically, I was a doorkeeper. I got
to stand inside the door and make sure that nobody
came in. We had the Secretaries of Labor and
Interior and Commerce who were all there trying to
represent, as well as the President and the Vice
President. People came from all over the northwest
appealing their cases. The loggers and the forest
products people were saying, “We’ve got to have
this, and we’ve got to keep these people working.”
We in the Fish and Wildlife Service realized that if
they kept cutting, in 10 years there would be no
more forest. We wondered how they couldn’t see
this. I remember President Clinton standing up and
saying that no one was going to be happy with him.
The environmentalists weren’t going to be happy
because they were going to let them cut a little bit.
The loggers weren’t going to be happy because they
couldn’t cut all they wanted. It was quite a day. It
was literally all day long. We, who were working in
there had to go and be cleared by Secret Service.
We arrived by bus at like 6:00 A.M., and the
meeting convened at maybe nine or ten. We had
Secret Service all over the place. It was very
interesting.
While I was working in the RD’s office something
that became apparent was the secretarial skills
needed to be upgraded if the secretary’s were
expected to be promoted. We started a Certified
Professional Secretary course for the secretaries in
the Regional office. The Deputy Regional
Director’s Secretary and I who had worked together
for many years were told that we would take it, and
we would pass. We had been taking this economics
course, which was hard. It was not an easy course.
We were taking accounting and more, and doing all
of this after hours. When we had the Forest
Conference out here and President Clinton started
talking about world economics I realized the reason
I was taking this course. It all kind of fell into place,
and he made it all very understandable. That was a
really exciting time, I thought, to be working for the
Service. And I felt very privileged to be in on that
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Conference. I thought that we were making a
difference in the world out there. It was fun.
DR. MADISON: It was an exciting time, and
you were.
MRS. GROVER: It really was. Of course, I can
remember Marv Plenert, the Regional Director
saying, “Now just wait until the salmon are
listed” (as an Endangered Species). Of course,
it happened. It wasn’t so much the Service,
because it is the National Marine Fisheries
Service that did the listing, but it does affect
everything of the Fish and Wildlife Service and
its National Fish Hatchery System so important
on the Columbia River and in the Northwest,
and of all the people that live there too. Those
were very interesting times. This training also
had the side benefit of qualifying me for
promotion. I was promoted to a GS-10, the
highest grade in the Service for my position
outside the Washington Office.
DR. MADISON: Judy, I have to break this off.
I have got to go and do the workshop. But this
was great! It was just fascinating!
MRS. GROVER: It’s an interesting life, Mark!
DR. MADISON: It is an interesting life. It must
have been a culture shock going from the
Hatcheries to the Regional Office to a certain
extent, wasn’t it?
MRS. GROVER: Yes, but I think we were
ready for it. We had grown. I thought that the 5
years that we spent in Florida were a growing
experience. All of us did. The kids did, too. We
were part of a neighborhood, after having only
been in this little government complex. You
really have kind of a narrow life out there, and
maybe that’s why people object to being
isolated now. We didn’t know any better when
we started out. The world has grown much in
those years, from the late 1950s and early
1960s to the new century.
DR. MADISON: I have to say that off the
record…
[tape ends]
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